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Keep it Simple, Stupid

Recently, after a conversation with a professional colleague on the current IT world, something reminded me of a Andres Diplotti cartoon I saw first time in Google+:

As a programmer I have been for a long time, and partly still I am, acknowledge that I have had this kind of arrogance (without going to these extremes) I guess it is a sin of youth that has been mitigated with age and that some of us already had since college.

By that time I remember to have discovered the software design patterns book from The Gang of Four. Our applications began to fill with design patterns, the more you used the better, in a kind of competition won by the one who used the more complex and difficult pattern. I guess this helps me to understand the posts and articles I see now on refactoring to eliminate design patterns and the cost of all these changes in some projects.

Over the years I learned firsthand the KISS principle (Keep it Simple , Stupid) not only with patterns, but also when customizing graphical components on screen or with the ‘ghost requirement’, a name that I heard on a rise to a co-worker to refer to those features that nobody asked but one believes important to the customer and that ‘for sure’ he would end up needing.

Long ago, a project manager on a client told me that someone in another team had indicated that it was impossible to get the functionality he asked. I replied that practically everything could be achieved by investing the necessary time. I was not clear enough . I should have added, Is it reasonable to use all that time on that functionality? With almost any programming language one can send a rocket to the moon but do you really want to go to the moon or do you want a working application on time?